WooCommerce 3.3 and my 50th commit 🎉

WooCommerce 3.3 launched yesterday. Since June 2015, I’ve been listed as a contributor for every major and minor release. I’m not going to lie; it’s a pretty sweet feeling to know that something you wrote a few lines of, is being used on over 2 million webshops.

GitHub is (not that) scary

When I joined WooThemes just over 3 years ago, I had never heard of GitHub or commits and pull requests. But GitHub scared the crap out of me. It was foreign and I was going to have to expose my lack of skill to some extremely skilled people.

About half a year in, I got to a stage where I felt bad bugging* the (very busy) core developers whenever I wanted to make a small change like a spelling or grammar edit of the copy of the text. It’s also a tedious process explaining what you want to have changed to then have the developer process it to then me checking it again.

This commit was included in WooCommerce 2.4 and since then, I think I’ve at least submitted one commit per major and minor version – which adds up to 7 versions to date.

Bigger changes

I’m quite proud of two morerecent commits, wherein I updated the dummy data files. I cleaned them up and also updated them to match the Storefront starter content. I submitted the CSV file, and also an updated XML file, both of them adding up to about 13,000 lines of code change, and – if I may say so – some very clean and fresh starter content.

My proudest contribution, however, is one that actually forced me to write my first lines of PHP.

Ever.

When I discovered the issue that tax suffixes were still displayed even when taxes were disabled, and I chatted to my colleague Matty about it, he encouraged me to fix it myself. What followed was a very clumsy line of commits, and me needing a lot of help from another colleague, Dwain, but I persisted and was able to make a change to WooCommerce core’s functionality. Its clumsiness will easily show how I got to 50 commits; a lot of them are correcting my own previous work.

The issue with price suffixes still being displayed when tax is disabled before I fixed it.

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Published by Job

Hallo! I'm a Belgian living in Cape Town with a passion for education, training and WordPress, trying to combine the three at the WooCommerce team of Automattic. In my spare time I run an e-zine called CULTURESHOCK, and enjoy movies, music, photography, reading, travelling, good food and (Belgian) beer.
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